In this interview Cecilia Dougherty describes her work and her explorations into family interactions, outsider psychology, role-playing, lesbian sexuality, and popular culture. Her videos Grapefruit (1989) and Coal Miner’s Granddaughter (1991) work from within mass culture norms to create a lesbian dialogue within the “normal”—what Dougherty calls “the life of the ordinary lesbian and her working-class family.” Her more recent vides explore lesbian identity within a separate social sphere.
Which celebrity do you most resemble? For artist Kip Fulbeck, this question starts a rollicking ride that is part autobiography, part family portrait, part pop-culture survey, and all Disney* all the time. Watch as Fulbeck documents his uncanny resemblance to Pochahontas, Mulan, Aladdin, and other "ethnically ambiguous" animated characters. Both hilarious and touching, this educating video examines the muting of race in mainstream media and its effects on multiracial Americans. *Disney is a registered trademark of Disney Enterprises, Inc.
In the 1960s and '70s, Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) emerged as one of the most important experimental filmmakers, creating structuralist works such as Zorns Lemma (1970), Poetic Justice (1972), and Nostalgia (1973).
A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are morphed together, forming an image of one person.
Big_Sleep™ explores problems in our archival urges. Via a single-channel desktop screencast, informatic elements ebb and flow—creating and relating interface absences. These gaps suggest that no amount of hard drive space can defy mortality.
This compilation is produced with "myself" as the sole object, as well as the material of the performance (except two videos with Akiko iimura). The videos are not just documents of the performances, but works of video-art made specifically for utilizing the video system, including the camera and monitor, as part of the performances. The collection also questions the identity of oneself in video, having tense relationships between words and images, and asks who is "I" and what "I" means.
DVD includes:
Self Identity, 1972, 1:00 excerpted
Trip is inspired by the main oeuvre of architect Raine Karp--the concert hall designed for the city of Tallinn between 1975-1980. Considered the most important building realized in Estonia, Linnahall is a time capsule preserving the utopian ideas of centralized power and of egalitarian modernism, and an example of how architecture can stir public emotions in our times of corporate dominance.
This video features California artists: drawer and painter Deanne Belinoff, sculptor and poet Sana Krusoe, wood relief carver and painter Palema Holmes, and New York-based video artist Shirley Clarke.
The Artists: Part 1 was produced in concert with the exhibition Four Solo Exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1988. The artists are introduced by LBMA’s senior curator Josine Ianco-Starrels. The video presents and contrasts the diverse styles, media, and personalities of these four women artists.
In Lossless #5, a water-ballet crafted by the famed Busby Berkley is compressed into an organic mitosis, within which we detect the spirit of a "buggy" Brakhage ghosting about the integrated circuit.
Cutting to the core of cinematic realism, Fountain presents the plot-less character of human encounters. In a string of moments with the people who have presented themselves to Cumming’s camera for over twenty years, Fountain allows the accidental and the absurd to dominate our impressions. Storytelling is evacuated in the process.
Circle's Short Circuit is an experimental feature-length work with neither a beginning nor an end—the film can be viewed from any random point. It moves through a circle of five interlocking episodes that describe the phenomenon of interruption in contemporary communication through various forms and modes, investigating causes, consequences, and side-effects. Genres shift along the episodic path of this circle, moving from documentary to essay, through collage, simulated live-coverage, and silent film.
This video features California artists: drawer and painter Deanne Belinoff, sculptor and poet Sana Krusoe, wood relief carver and painter Palema Holmes, and New York-based video artist Shirley Clarke.
The Artists: Part 1 was produced in concert with the exhibition Four Solo Exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1988. The artists are introduced by LBMA’s senior curator Josine Ianco-Starrels. The video presents and contrasts the diverse styles, media, and personalities of these four women artists.
Transmission from the Liberated Zones is an experiment which brings together Swedish statements and documents, accessed and presented by a boy through a low-fidelity feedback channel — an optical dimension created to move through time, and between tepid and tropic encounters.
A young moviemaker discusses the horror film he hopes to open commercially. In the process he opens his lavish apartment to the hungry eyes and tummy of he who rots in the sidelights. During this discourse we feast on the vitality of youth as it restores life to the walking and digesting dead who bring maturity to both sacred and profane altars. Also along for the ride is a redheaded fleshpot in need of sudsy holy water for a good gargle.
"This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher. Farocki's admiration for Straub was so great that he said of Between Two Wars, Perhaps I only made this film to earn Straub's recognition." In this observation-driven film, Farocki documents the fulfillment of his wish. The film shows Farocki, under Straub's direction, rehearsing for his role as Delamarche in the film Klassenverhältnisse (1983). Anyone who has seen Farocki's documentary of the shoot will never forget these short scenes.
A rumination on Time, with a capital "T". Time and its ravages, which really just means its progression, its nature. Set off by an "old" poem, a T.S. Eliot poem that's literally haunted me for 30? or 40? yrs
... even before I became an old man myself.
(It's an old man's rumblings, and it never fails to move me. I used a quote from it in a film I made 25yrs ago, and the book still calls to me from its place on the bookshelf, its pages yellow, dry as bone.)
A portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man. The filmmaker attempts to enter the digital age by making a new video version of one of his old films.
"The award of the Short Film Festival goes to a video in which the reflection of artistic work becomes a form itself. John Smith manages to give us a self-ironic humorous experiment about art and time."
—Prize of the International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen 2000
This title is also available on John Smith: Program 2.
Using color video Freed captures three mirrors in various positions on a grassy lawn. As the title suggests, Freed employs reflections in the work to signify video’s intrinsic quality of spatial manipulation. In the mirrors, we catch ephemeral glimpses of Freed’s family and friends, surrounding nature and various structures such as nearby seating or an old wooden fence.
Workers Leaving the Factory — such was the title of the first cinema film ever shown in public. For 45 seconds, this still-existent sequence depicts workers at the photographic products factory in Lyon, owned by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, hurrying, closely packed, out of the shadows of the factory gates and into the afternoon sun. Only here, in departing, are the workers visible as a social group. But where are they going? To a meeting? To the barricades? Or simply home?
In 1972 Eric Siegel, an early pioneer of video art, set out on an extreme adventure driving from Europe six thousand miles overland to India. He was one of the first people to use the revolutionary new technology from Sony Corporation, the Portapak. This was the first small portable video camera/recorder combo that was the predecessor of today’s camcorders. Together with his friend Anthony they documented the trip. This video is the portion of the trip that took them through Afghanistan, one of the most exotic places along the way.
Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audio tape found by the artists within a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with images of the place where it was found. The work explores the potential of chance, creating portraits of particular places by building formal, narrative, and musical connections between images and sounds, linked by the random discoveries of the tape samples.
The plot of this colorful and episodic video drama concerns the gifted protégé of a war torn world who is granted a glimpse into the future by reading the imprinted impressions of human buttocks. At least that is what I think it is about. There are many loud sequences of inner and outer turmoil with pretty cast members being faithful to the weaving plot line as it spins its convoluted tale of exposed rear ends and dangling subplots. The pace is fast and painless as a parade of young people bring to life a story ripped from the pages of our most lurid, celebrity tabloids.
Videofreex members Davidson Gigliotti, Bart Friedman, Skip Blumberg and Nancy Cain travel to Syracuse, New York to attend an exhibition and two-day conference featuring video art at the Everson Museum of Art held from April 4-7, 1974. More than simply recording this event known formally as “Video and the Museum,” the tape poignantly highlights the ways in which the Freex—by wielding a video camera—simultaneously become art world archivists, video collaborators, and on-the-ground reporters of culture and art in the 1970s.
Big_Sleep™ explores problems in our archival urges. Via a single-channel desktop screencast, informatic elements ebb and flow—creating and relating interface absences. These gaps suggest that no amount of hard drive space can defy mortality.
In this interview, American filmmaker, teacher, and video artist Peggy Ahwesh (b.1954) delves into the key figures and primary texts that have inspired her work in Super-8 and video since the 1970s. She discusses her early influences as a member of the underground art scenes in Pittsburgh in the late 70s and Soho’s Kitchen in the 80s. Ahwesh’s experimental hand-processing and controversial subject matter can be traced to feminist theory, and her exposure to underground experimental films, including works by Werner Herzog, George Amaro, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith and her teacher at Antioch College, Tony Conrad.
